Following this stream of conciousness all the way to the ocean.

Occasionally when I am closing out registers at work I find some really cool coins. Yesterday I found a penny from 1947. Granted pennies of that era are still fairly common it was still interesting. I mean that penny was minted shortly after World War II and has been slowly wandering the country since then.
By far the coolest thing I found was a nickel from 1887. This coin was minted just 22 years after General Lee surrendered his forces at the Appomattox Court House. The coin had been in circulation for about 120 years. It was in pretty bad shape and so couldn’t really be sold but that is irrelevant. Just to hold the thing and feel the weight of the history behind it, wondering where it has traveled and who has had it. One of the guys I work with is a coin collector and so he swapped out that nickel for a new one out of his own pocket so he could keep it safe and display it. He asked me if I wanted it and I said no at the time, deciding that he could be better entrusted with it since that was his hobby, but a part of me wishes I had kept it.
Things that old in this part of the country end up in museums, and so I was shocked to find it in a cash register at work.

Thinking back to the time I went to England though puts the age of the coin in some perspective. We were at Newgrange and while inside the structure I noticed graffiti cut into the walls and just as I was mentally cursing the idiots who did it I realized all the graffiti was pre-1820. Yeah our stuff is brand new by comparison.

Newgrange

Originally built between c.3300-2900BC according to Carbon 14 dates (Grogan 1991), it is more than 500 years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, and predates Stonehenge trilithons by about 1,000 years (although the earliest stages of Stonehenge are roughly contemporary with Newgrange). It lay lost for over 4,000 years due to mound slippage, until the late 17th century, when men looking for building stone uncovered it, and described it as a cave.